WASHINGTON – Arizona high schools have increased their graduation rate by 24 percentage points in the last decade, the biggest increase in the country, according to a national report released this month.

While the state has improved, it still ranks only in the middle of the pack nationally, according to the report from Education Week and the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center. It said Arizona graduated 72 percent of its high school students in 2009, putting the state “a hair below” the national average for the year.

The most striking fact about Arizona’s “whopping improvement” is that graduation rates have improved more than three times faster than the national average of 7.3 percentage points, said Sterling Lloyd, a senior research associate for the center.

Still a long way to go, but it's nice to see that Arizona has been moving steadily in the right direction for a decade.